Earlier (ok, in the only previous, first post on this blog) I discussed the recent study of Zachary Horne et al. (2015), where they concluded that threatening communication may be an effective approach to counter anti-vaccination attitudes. One of the problems with this study was that the manipulation was not valid: the conditions differed on many variables, any of which may explain the results they found.

After I deliberated for a while whether to inform the authors of the blog post, I decided to do so in the spirit of academic debate, transparency, and learning from each other. He swiftly replied, and one of the things he dis was correct my assumption that they did not share their data. They did actually share their data! I think that’s very commendable – I strongly believe that all researchers should Fully Disclose. Zachary posted it at the excellent (and free) Open Science Framework repository, specifically at http://osf.io/nx364. After having downloaded the data, I decided to write a brief follow-up post about matching of conditions and validity of manipulations. Continue reading “The importance of matching: a case study”